Creative photography session extended.

photography tutorial - part 2.

I decided to break this blog post in three parts as on the set I used three different lighting setups. Although my second lighting, conceptually, was very similar to the first one still there were few important changes that I need to do so I could’ve change the whole mood and look of my photographs.

After we had some break and drinks I started moving all of my lighting to my new location. As you can imagine moving all of the setup is very demanding thing to do. Anyway the art require its own price for us to pay, which for most artist is the hard work they put into what they create. Being a London based professional photographer I had developed this quality practice of running up and down in sorting everything on my own as not every time I could have an assistant on the photo shoot. Now after moving all the lights on their new position I need to rethink my strobes colour strategy. I wanted my next set of images to be much more moody and kind of spooky, plus I had this really wonderful and reach on texture wall on the background which was going to suit perfectly the purpose of the upcoming action.

My key light was a Canon 580 EXII mounted on Large Interfit softbox on the right side of my camera. This light was gelled in blue and also the soft box had its diffusers and the grid on. Then as a fill light I setup another Canon flash this time on a large beauty dish. The fill was gelled in very light ¼ cut of Green. Now on this particular setup this light isn’t very noticeable as green and this is due to the light zone pattern I was trying to create, this will become clearer when we get to the rim lights. I positioned two bare Canon 430 EX flashguns on both side of my model as rim lights.

The zoom on my rim flashes was set to 24mm, the widest they could be set, as I wanted to create this zone/pattern of blue light that surrounds and warps around my object, I forgot to mention that both of my rim lights were gelled blue as well. Although my widely spread rim lights were covering the back wall I still decided to add an extra background light so to break the even distribution of the blue light.

For this purpose I used 580 EX gelled with full cut of green gel and as modifier for my back light I used a Coco ring flash adapter. I really like the pattern and shape of the light that this modifier produces, and for some purposes it fits quite well into the whole setup.